Churchillian it was not. Yet the State of the Union
seemed a success if Bush's purpose was to buy time from
Congress to wait and see if his surge of U.S. forces
into Iraq might yet succeed.

But when Bush started to describe the ideological war
we are in, one began to understand why we are in the
mess we are in.

"This war," said Bush, "is an ideological
struggle. ... To prevail, we must remove the conditions
that inspire blind hatred and drove 19 men to get onto
airplanes and to come to kill us." [Text
of SOTU]

But the "conditions" that drove those 19 men
"to come to kill us" is our dominance of their
world, our authoritarian allies and Israel.

They were over here because we are over there.

If Bush is going to remove those "conditions,"
he is going to have to get us out of the Middle East. Is
he prepared to do that?

Of course not. Because Bush, believing the problem is
not our pervasive presence but the lack of freedom in
the Middle East, is waging his own ideological war to
bring freedom in by force of arms, if necessary.

"What every terrorist
fears most is human freedom—societies where men and
women make their own choices."

Very American. But the truth is terrorists do not
fear free societies, they flourish in them. The suicide
bombers of
9-11,
Madrid and
London all plotted their atrocities in free
societies. From the Red Brigades, who murdered Italy's
Aldo Mori, to the
Baader-Meinhof Gang, who tried to kill Al Haig, to
the Basque ETA, the
IRA and the
Puerto Rican terrorists who tried to
assassinate Harry Truman, free societies are where
they do their most effective work.

Stalin's Russia and Nazi Germany had no trouble with
terrorists.

"Free people are not drawn to violent and
malignant ideologies," declared Bush. Oh? Explain,
then, why 70 million Germans, under the most democratic
government in their history, gave more than half their
votes to Nazis and Communists in 1933? In every
plebiscite he held, Hitler won a landslide. In the year
of
Anschluss and
Munich, 1938, Hitler was
Time's Man of the Year and far more popular than
FDR, who lost 71 seats in the House.

In the free elections Bush demanded in Egypt,
Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, the winners were the Muslim
Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas and Shia militants with
ties to Iran.

If a referendum were held in the Middle East on the
proposition of the U.S. military out and Israel gone,
how does Bush think it would come out?

"So we advance our security interests by helping
moderates, reformers and brave voices for democracy,"
said Bush. But how many of those "moderates"—Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Kuwait, the Gulf
States—are ruled "by brave voices for democracy"?

Our Islamist enemies would likely endorse unanimously
a Bush call for free elections in all those countries,
as elections could not but help advance to greater
power, at the expense of our friends, those same
Islamist enemies.

What is Bush doing? The America that won the Cold War
said ideology be damned, we stand by our friends.

"The great question of our day is whether America
will help men and women in the Middle East to build free
societies," said Bush.

But if we bleed our country to give the men and women
of the Middle East the freedom to choose the society
they wish to live in, are we sure they will not choose a
society
where Sharia is law?

In liberated Afghanistan, popular sentiment was
behind beheading that Muslim who converted to
Christianity.

What leads Bush to believe everyone wants to be like
us? Is it not ideology?

To characterize "the totalitarian ideology" we
confront, Bush quoted Osama bin Laden: "Death is
better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers
among us."

This is the true mark of the true believer. But did
not the
Spain of Isabella want the "unbelievers"
removed from "among us"? Did not Elizabeth I feel
the same about
Catholics?